8/29/10 - Road Trips

I know someone who is traveling in the desert right now on a sort of pilgrimage, and then I did a little driving today to meet friends for a movie and to buy groceries, so I was thinking of being on the road. I love that feeling of driving in the car somewhere and it's hot and it's summer and you roll the window down and stick one of your feet into that fast car breeze. And I know that driving and using gas is not terribly ecological, so please translate all this in your head to driving an oxcart or riding a horse, because they're more ecological, if slower, and I'd gladly substitute if I had to. Or translate it to running on my own two feet, yes, I would do the road trip making my own tracks if it meant I got to travel and see the world to the side speeding by my cheeks.

I read Jack Kerouac's book sometime in college, I don't remember if it was before or after my best road trip, but I love the maniacal feeling of going over the road with friends and time and rest be damned--we'll get there as soon as we can. Driving the graveyard shift was my specialty on that great road trip when I was 21--four people in a little Chevette that kept having problems--the muffler almost fell off in PA, and the radiator starting leaking in Arizona, so we had to turn on the heat to keep the engine cool--that's right, we had the heat on in the Arizona desert in June. And it took 3 1/2 days from Boston to LA, and I loved driving overnight, but I also loved when we stopped, piled out and unrolled sleeping bags under the stars.

Road trips, tossing all your necessities into the back seat and letting them toss around like suitcase salad, as you take out stuff you need & put things back at random. Naming the clouds that go by, making friends with the trees, their clumps of leaves nodding in the prairie wind. Putting your hand out the window to feel the passing, of place, of time, of air.